system becomes very slow

[Jean-Marie PIVETEAU]

the problem is that sometimes, after the triggering of some event, the machine becomes progressively very slow so that i am to ctrl-alt-backspace to force the closing of the Gnome session. Some event seems to trigger the slowness which become more and more important: for example the mouse pointer does not respond instantly to the mouse movement. A mouse click will not take effect instantly. When the slowness comes in, i can see the following:
- constant disk access
- i have the System Monitor on my gnome panel: the load (in red) is becoming more and more important to reach about five (the little black box becomes progressively red)
- the cpu indicator of the System Monitor shows many many picks very close to each other so that you cannot see some black color in the box, but it is rather light blue
- when I could use "top" to look at the processes, more and more processes appeared with a "D" status (which is defined as "uninterruptible sleep" in the top man page).
The first time the problem occured i was browsing with Firefox. Is is not that as soon as I launched Firefox, the machine would become slower; it is that at some later time an event triggered that made appear progressively the slowness. So I installed epiphany, and it seemed that i did not get the problem anymore: but later I wanted to see the site http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/tracking/ and epiphany asked me to download the applet but it did not work, so i suspected the java plugin not configured for epiphany, so i configured it and then I relauched epiphany and went back to the above site and the slowness started to appear ...
I think I can reproduce the problem by trying to executing a Java applet, but that is not sure. I will try again the above applet and will let you know.
this problem started to appear about 10 days ago and I can't trace back what I did or what changed which created the problem. Maybe an online update.
I have Ubuntu 6.10, kernel 2.6.17-11. My machine is an IBM Netvista A21 (CPU = Celeron 1GHz, RAM = 256MB, Chipset = Intel 82810).

[Dennis Francis (dennisfrancis)]

Thank you for reporting this problem. Could you post the output of the command 'dmesg ' here ? [ Use 'dmesg > filename' and copy the contents of this file to here]

[Jean-Marie PIVETEAU (jean-marie-piveteau)]

here is the dmesg output (I booted my machine 10 minutes ago.

also, yesterday night I launched the applet with ephiphany and no slowness appeared. Then (or before) I launched Realplay to view a NASA TV, and the slowness appeared ... I will do more test later.

[Dennis Francis (dennisfrancis)]

Kindly post the files /proc/meminfo and /etc/fstab.
Thank you.

[Jean-Marie PIVETEAU (jean-marie-piveteau)]

here is meminfo.

[Jean-Marie PIVETEAU (jean-marie-piveteau)]

here is fstab.

[Dennis Francis (dennisfrancis)]

Seems like no swap is getting used. Do you have a swap partition in your system ? If yes, could you give us the output of the command 'fdisk -l' ? And if you don't have a swap, making a swap partition should solve the issue.
Note : With 256M of RAM that you have, you still need to have a swap partition [of around 512M].

[Jean-Marie PIVETEAU (jean-marie-piveteau)]

here is the outpout of fdisk -l /dev/hda (I have only one disk):

Disque /dev/hda: 20.0 Go, 20020396032 octets
255 têtes, 63 secteurs/piste, 2434 cylindres
Unités = cylindres de 16065 * 512 = 8225280 octets

Périphérique Amorce Début Fin Blocs Id Système
/dev/hda1 * 1 31 248976 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 32 2434 19302097+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 32 2434 19302066 8e Linux LVM

But I don't understand I would have lost my swap partition, because I am almost sure I have created one.
How is it that is problem exist only since about 2 weeks ? My system is installed since a year ...

[Jean-Marie PIVETEAU (jean-marie-piveteau)]

i searched on the web "ubuntu lost swap".

I found this (and I think the solution is here): http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=287962

And yes I did only one time an hibernate test, about two weeks ago... I remember that it did not work very well and I did not notice the error about the missing swap.

do you think I can use the /dev/mapper/Ubuntu-swap_1 file for the mkswap command ?

(in the meantime I use a regular swap file: I have no slowness anymore, but I would like to restore my swap partition).

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

This version of Ubuntu (Edgy Eft) has reached end of life and is not supported anymore. So we are closing this report. If this is still an issue, can you try with latest Ubuntu release ? Thanks in advance.

[Jean-Marie PIVETEAU (jean-marie-piveteau)]

thank you. Not a problem that you close this report.
I did not had time to return to a swap partition. I am probably (did not check) still running with a swap file, since then I upgraded to 8.04 (via 7.04, and 7.10)